How To Come Up With Good Ideas | Mark Rober | TEDxYouth@ColumbiaSC

so I'm going to attempt today to answer a question I get asked a lot and I always just sort of have a sucky response to it and the question is this how do you come up with your ideas so disclaimer I'm not claiming to be some amazing creative genius right I am one data point but maybe something I can say from my experience can maybe help you in something you do in your life and the reason I could ask this as mentioned was three and a half years ago this was my Halloween costume and I had an iPad on the front and back if you do a FaceTime chat it looks like you have a hole in your body which is cool right my favorite part of the costume was that at the Halloween cut pot party you're at is a little bit lame could always play Angry Birds so as we kind of have this mic so basically put that video out it went sort of viral three million views overnight front page of CNN the main complaint though is like cool idea bro but I don't have $1200 for Halloween costume so basically my challenge was to come up with like a cooler Halloween costume that wasn't quite as expensive right and so while working my day job as a NASA engineer on the Curiosity rover that was like three months before we send it to Mars at night I was working on this this concept right and so I called the company digital duds and so this is kind of how it works so you play a video on your phone and you slide it into like a shirt so it's a really cheap it yeah sorry it's kind of big it's a really inexpensive implementation of this concept right you buy $20 shirt and it's a free app yeah apologize that's very large and so the thing that I learned basically from this experience is that I like this feeling of putting something out there and having people see it and sort of getting that feedback and making it feel like you know your creative efforts were appreciated so I decided every month I would try and put out a YouTube video about a creative idea and so we started a YouTube channel and now it has like it's way more than we first thought it's like 42 million views on the site and like 100 thousand subscribers which is supercool certainly no cutie pie but it's but it's an exciting opportunity and so here are just a couple of real quick ideas that we put on the channel so this is like you put a GoPro on a ceiling fan upside down it's like ghetto bullet time from like the matrix right so this is just a GoPro that's spinning around you play the footage back it has this really cool looking effect or this is if you put the FLIR like an infrared on the front of an iPhone I'm actually stealing this woman's pin here because I figured out that certain keypads if you touch the keypad it leaves behind a thermal signature so you can see where they touched right and so I put this video out saying like dude bad guys can use this simple solution is just rub your hand across all the keys when you're done and then it leaves like a meaningless thermal signature another idea is a no-mess watermelon smoothie right so you just get a coat hanger to drill it's really refreshing and slightly creepy stumbled upon that one and finally this idea if you use the front-facing camera on your phone and then take it to the zoo and put it like in front of the monkey exhibit the monkeys see it and they're really interested so you get this really cool footage with just a dumb phone right and before you get all smug and laugh at the monkeys I actually repeated this experiment on higher order primates as well so some of the videos have sound too so if we could just turn the sound up a little bit it's fine but in the future thank you um so going back full circle how do you come up with your ideas I think what people are really asking when they ask this is how can I come up with more good ideas like how do I be more creative because there's this there's this myth and I like it because it's tackles of Smith head-on that you know people are either creative or you're not like it's some gift bestowed from on high either you have good ideas or you don't and that's not true in my opinion curiosity or creativity is sort of like a muscle you develop so for the next couple minutes I want to just talk about like how you develop that muscle basically so there's three steps that I've kind of feel like I figured out for step one we're going to go to the ancient city of Alexandria 300 BC they did something interesting here whenever a ship went into their port they would board it forcefully but the soldiers weren't looking for gold or spices and one of their books they would take the books in the library and they would copy them and as a result they got this amazing knowledge this database it's like you know Wikipedia of 3300 BC of just all these experiences of people across the world and we had people like Euclid and Archimedes who study there and they had incredible advancements because of this approach they were really curious about the world around them they observed it and they try to solve these you know these problems there's this this quote that I really like the most exciting phrase to hear in science the one that heralds new discoveries is not Eureka but that's funny and and the and the key to all good adventures if you think about it even the scientific method first step is observation it starts with observing the world around you a great example of this is the microwave oven this was first invented by a guy named Percy Spencer and he was working on a radar tube he had a mr. Goodbar in his pocket and all the sudden the thing melted which seems incredibly dangerous now that we know about microwaves but he saw this thing melt and he's like well that's weird like that's funny he had that one of those that's funny moments and so he observed that and went back and did some research and figured out what was going on and from that we got the microwave so the first step I think in the way to be more creative is to be curious and if you think about the most like creative group of people on earth I think it's probably kids like my son could take a bucket and just play with it for like three hours and that's amazing with kids is because they're always questioning and looking and observing and making connections about the world around them I think that sort of gets beat out of us like in the school system somehow and by the time we're your guys age a lot of people like oh I'm just not creative right that's not what you said when you were in kindergarten I think the most creative people that I know that I respect are those who've been able to maintain that kid-like approach and view of the world Johnny I've is the head designer at Apple brilliant guy and he says it's for him it's almost like a curse when he looks at objects and designs and stuff he's always asking like well why is it that way and not this way it's like you can't turn that off he's always asking that question an Apple has this amazing way of making products there you go that just seemed different right and this is a great quote about that the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as escaping from old ones and a lot of times you know you pictured almost like there's a hill and everyone's trying to optimize and get to the top of this hill and Apple sometimes can step back and just be like well there's another hill over here that's really big right and so the hallmark of good design is when people can look at it and be like wow like how did how did nobody think of that before when the design in hindsight seems really obvious I had an opportunity like this about a year ago I was cooking a frozen burrito in my kitchen and I'm like microwaves have not changed it felt like for 40 years I'm like like what could we do differently as humans rely primarily on our sense of sight and so I figured since infrared my infrared lenses are pretty cheap now it'd be awesome if you could put your burrito in the microwave and you could see it cooking right so you get a heat map on the front of the microwave you could visually tell what it was done but it gets better because you could like put your bowl of soup in the microwave and then you could like go upstairs and be working and then after four minutes it's not quite done you don't see all white you just like add 30 seconds so it's like a different approach right and this one actually has a happy ending because I got a patent on this and I'm working with like a couple the big guys to get it into a Walmart near you so at some point if you ever see this just buy it I don't care how much it costs all right just buy it so that's step one being curious right so step two I think look to this thing called the marshmallow challenge this guy named Tom Wu Jack does this he's done it over like 70 times and what he does is he gives people a challenge he's some spaghetti some tape and some string and a marshmallow and he says in 18 minutes why do you build a tallest tower you can with the marshmallow on top and the fascinating thing about this he's done it a bunch of times and there's one group that consistently beats CEOs lawyers and businessmen and that group is kindergartners seriously and the reason why explains is because you know the adults look at the situation and first of all the first three minutes is like a power struggle who's going to be the leader right and then once they sort of figure that out they start building something but they don't actually put the marshmallow on until the very end at like minutes 17 and marshmallows are deceptively heavy and so then the whole structure buckles and I'll I have nothing with like a minute left whereas kindergarteners by contrast they just start building right away there's no power struggle right and kindergarteners instead is putting marshmallow on ones on average they put it on four to five times so about four minutes into it they're already putting the marshmallow on top and sort of testing it and so because of that because they're sort of testing early and often they're able to get to a solution that actually works and it literally consistently the board they do better so step two I'm calling a sort of work hard and for every like design you see from Apple right behind the scenes there's like forty devices prototypes that you never seen Thomas Edison said he came up with you know ten thousand light bulbs before he found one that worked James Dyson the vendor of like the cyclone thing said he had five hundred five thousand one hundred twenty seven failed prototypes before he had a mic you know a vacuum that actually sucked like sucked like in the sense that like it sucked it was good right that was like a success right the point is it's like whatever you do do it like if you're like a sculptor just sculpt if you if you you know paint paint a ton if you like photography don't say I'm just not a creative photographer just go out and take a ton of pictures and fail and learn for basically what you're doing and you know by doing this you sort of discover you know you fail and you learn and you get better it's interesting to know that the guy who invented the microwave you know other people had actually had the the chocolate bar melt in their pocket but he was the first person to actually do something about it and actually have that like kindergarteners approach of curiosity and trying to figure out what was going on there so I actually had an experience where I kind of implemented steps one into a little a little while ago where I remember reading as a kid that if you know people will swerve more on the road to hit turtles than they would snakes which always seemed interesting to me so I actually ran an experiment so I had the curiosity and I went out and I placed by the side of the road alternating like snakes and turtles right and then I collected data in a lab coat so it looked official and it turns out my hypothesis was wrong so like actually people did swerve to it snakes more than turtles but there are turtle turtle killers amongst us that got messed up but what's interesting is that some people really cool like this lady was really nice she started throwing plums at my rubber snake you encouraged it to like get off the road it didn't move it didn't move in the end or this guy this guy yeah he was like I thought he's trying to get the tarantula safety that's cool but then he just when he got this car just ran it over anyways or this guy he was cool like he was saving the snake I was like that's cool and he's like oh it's fake I'm gonna take this home and like give it to my wife or something and so hey that's my snake I'm right here trying to do some science so in hindsight I think I think my mistake was trying to appeal to his love of science that was the disconnect but this is a great example of like when I told people I did this that I've released a video of it you know people who like wait so like you use you crouch in the bushes for like 10 hours like videoing cars and stuff and I'm like yeah and for a lot of people are like you're weird you're crazy but that's sort of the point like part of the creative process is just putting in you know the elbow grease putting in the time so for step three this is supposed to be blank you guys so for step three I think it's important to think about our concept in general in society of what creativity is back in people have noted this but with the Romans we actually get the word genius from them but to them what a genius was was like a troll that lived in your walls and at night when you like had your piece of art you were working on it would come out and like sprinkle like creative dust on your work of art and this had an interesting impact because if you were really good you're kind of humble about it cuz you're like well I just got a really good genius you know that lives in my wall but if your work it's kind of sucked then you know it's like well what could you do my genius is kind of lame right so it's like there's what could you do and the sort of benefit of thinking about it this way is it sort of takes it out you know takes you a little bit out of it and I think that's the truth lie somewhere between the way we think of genius and the way the Romans did you know I don't believe you know even partially that there's like little trolls living in their wall in your walls but there is important to know that the part of the creative process is just about getting lucky there's an interesting book called good to great and this author interviewed a bunch of CEOs and ten of them like supposedly these companies that will never fail awesome ones and she tried to find her he tried to find the common like thread the thing that connected all of them and what I appreciated is all ten of them mentioned that you know a lot of what happened they just got a couple lucky breaks like they got some they got lucky getting certainly there was some skill involved but a lot of it had to do with luck and as humans we don't like that like we try to assign a reason for stuff there's a there's a fancy term called hindsight bias which is when we look back at points that are actually random we try to connect them and create a narrative as an example like if there was 1,024 of us in this room and I gave each one of you a quarter I said flip that ten times statistically one of you would get 10 tails in a row and what happens usually is the media swoops in and then you know it's like let's look at Kevin like you know he got ten tails in a row look at his flip technique you know and his fingers and the way his wrist was and how his elbow and his posture like that's what we do it's funny even returning on that point with good degrade of the ten companies two of the CEO she profiled for the CEOs for Circuit City and Fannie Mae because the book was written like ten years ago right which we know or I didn't work out so well so whether you call it like luck or karma or blessings I think it is helpful to think there's some part of this process that's a little bit out of your control because then if you're Thomas Edison you've build 9999 you know light bulbs you don't say I give up because you realize you trust the process review james dyson you build 5,000 vacuums it's like trust the process and keep going and i'm not saying don't misinterpret of that being creative is just it's all luck but my point is is as you are creative and you observe and you you know question your world as you work hard and you you build early and often you increase your chances of getting lucky you're basically giving yourself more quarters to flip so you can get 10 tails in a row and so my punchline today is that i believe we are all more like way more creative than we give ourselves credit for it's just about understanding the process so returning full circle how do you come up with your ideas for the first time ever the most unsecured response i've ever given i'm proud to say the key is to be curious to work hard and to get lucky thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 909,583

Rating: 4.9482393 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Creation, Education, Ideas, Innovation

Id: L1kbrlZRDvU

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2015